MUSIC: PLAYLIST

MUSIC: PLAYLIST; Prince at 45: An R & B Recidivist

By JON PARELES

Published: May 2, 2004

PRINCE -- Prince is feeling his age, 45, on ''Musicology'' (NPG/Columbia). The video for the title song (at www.mtv.com) is nostalgic for 45-r.p.m. singles, and in it Prince sings a fogy's credo: ''Don't you miss the feeling music gave you back in the day?'' He has given up trying to cross the hip-hop divide, and he spends much of the album skillfully rewriting his old songs. But on ''Life 'o' the Party'' he comes up with a brittle rhythm track to rival Timbaland. Meanwhile, who among his successors has both the political will to examine post-9/11 prejudice (in ''Cinnamon Girl'') and the lascivious sense of humor for songs like the premarital come-on ''On the Couch''? Yes, OutKast.

And . . . ?

LAURA VEIRS -- Laura Veirs reaches from the folky to the metaphysical on her album ''Carbon Glacier'' (Bella Union import, www.bellaunion.com). She's a Seattle-based songwriter with a confidently unpolished voice and music rooted in quasi-Appalachian fingerpicked guitar. Her band, the Tortured Souls, can keep the arrangements quiet and cozy or veer toward tape-looped drumbeats and distorted electric viola. The songs touch on reincarnation, reversing time and merging with the earth and sea, but her music balances the otherworldly with the homey.

DIRTY DOZEN BRASS BAND -- Since 1977, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band has jazzed up and funked up the New Orleans brass band legacy. But lately it has been working the jam-band circuit with a busy wah-wah guitar that drowns out its polyphonic horns. ''Funeral for a Friend'' (Ropeadope/Artemis) is the corrective: a memorial for a founding band member, Anthony Lacen (Tuba Fats), that reclaims the dirges and second-line struts of a New Orleans funeral. It starts out fairly traditional, then hooks up with ragtime guitar, rhythm-and-blues vamps and gospel vocals, taking liberties without leaving New Orleans behind.

LLOYD COLE -- Lloyd Cole made ''Music in a Foreign Language'' (One Little Indian) mostly by himself. That suits an album of falling-out-of-love songs in which a guy who sounds thoughtful and sensitive soon reveals himself as utterly self-centered. Mr. Cole's piano and guitar undulate through every song, suggesting the stasis of a man in emotional limbo. But it's easy to see how he got into the affairs he now regrets: he's got memorable opening lines, like ''Rather than you, she said, I prefer solitude.''

TARIKA -- The island of Madagascar has home-grown stringed instruments found nowhere else on earth. Tarika, a group led by two close-harmonizing sisters, has plugged in those lutes, harps and zithers to plink and strum kinetic three-chord songs that carry their conscientious messages lightly. Tarika's ''10: Beasts, Ghosts and Dancing With History'' (Triloka/Artemis) is a 10th-anniversary compilation that also includes video clips that show the instruments and singers in action.

ERIC CLAPTON: The billing is all too accurate on ''Me and Mr. Johnson'' (Reprise), Eric Clapton's tribute album to the Delta blues enigma Robert Johnson. When Mr. Clapton played Johnson songs like ''Crossroads'' with Cream in the 1960's, he fired them up with psychedelic tumult. Now, with a complacent studio band, he treats them as jocular novelties, capturing none of Johnson's deep dread or savage irony. The hellhound's not on his trail -- it's on a leash.

LOS TIGRES DEL NORTE -- ''Las Mujeres de Juarez'' (''The Women of Juarez'') shows up as one more bouncy tune on the current album by the Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte, ''Pacto de Sangre'' (Fonovisa). It's a norteño (Tex-Mex) corrido with two accordions tootling back and forth and singers who sound exasperated. But it is no joke. The song is about the murders of more than 300 girls and women during the past decade in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, and it calls the failure to solve them a ''national shame'' for Mexico. Los Tigres del Norte have been singing border stories -- about emigrants, drug dealers, hard times and love -- for more than three decades, and they're not about to pretty things up now.

'PLAYBACK' -- Mark Coleman's book ''Playback'' (Da Capo) is a breezy, informative history of the continuing dalliance between music and machines, from Edison cylinders to transistor radios to Ipods. For more than a century, every new gadget brings the same response from copyright owners and musicians: fear, resistance and desperate manipulations of the technology that's about to make them more prosperous. ''This strategy usually backfires,'' Mr. Coleman observes.

D12 FEATURING EMINEM: The hit rapper's excise tax is an obligation toward his posse: the hometown buddies and hangers-on awaiting guest spots and record deals. The hilarious video for ''My Band'' (at www.d12online.com), by Eminem and his Detroit posse, D12, slips some truth behind the comic hyperbole. As girls flock to Eminem in his private dressing room and giant tour bus, his ''band,'' D12, follows along in a rickety van, gets bounced from its own show by security and grouses ineffectually about being overshadowed. They are; Eminem does most of the rapping and singing. But if the single's a hit, D12 can stay eclipsed all the way to the bank.

Photos: The Seattle-based Laura Viers, top, writes songs about reversing time; Prince spends much of his new album trying to make it happen. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Wireimage.com); (Photo by Bil Elsinger)